It is interesting to note how quick many Christians are to take the worldly view and deny that Mary, after giving birth to Christ, remained celibate for the remainder of her days. Exactly why some Christians feel the need to argue against Mary's virginity mystifies me -- did not Paul teach us that to remain celibate for the sake of the Kingdom was a high calling indeed? (c.f. 1 Corinthians 7) Is it not possible that Mary chose this path of devotion for herself, knowing that it was pleasing to the Lord? Is it not possible that Joseph, her faithful and righteous husband, would have been unwilling to defile his wife in the sexual act (c.f. Leviticus 15) after her body had given birth to the Son of God, meaning in turn (as Luke reminds us, in how he structures his account of the Annunciation) that she was the Ark of the New Covenant?

The haste with which many deny the ongoing virginity of Mary is, as I noted, something of a worldly view, for it is not well-supported in Scripture. Oh, I'm aware of the passages concerning Jesus' brothers and sisters...and I'm equally aware that the language of the Hebrews had few words with which to describe extended family; often, in Hebrew writings, assemblies of family members were abstracted as "brothers and sisters". And yes, the Gospels were written in Greek...but the writers themselves were Hebrew, and would have written with the cultural biases of their native land in mind.

We live in a sex-obsessed world, and moreover we live in a world which has been getting more sex-obsessed as the centuries have rolled along. Look back at the early church; even in Martin Luther's time, as well as long before that, the virginity of Mary was an accepted part of Christian teaching. Martin Luther certainly believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary, and it should be noted that his tomb is inscribed with an image of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

Indeed, the mainstreaming of the denial of Mary's virginity is a fairly recent thing, and I think it has quite a lot to do with the direction the world's attitude toward sex has taken. Many Christians don't even want to acknowledge that Mary is, according to the Bible, to be called "blessed" by all nations (and presumably in all ages). I would wager that many Christians also don't want to admit, with any kind of frequency, that Mary is the foremost example of Christian devotion to the will of the Lord.

And I'd wager, following along from that, that many Christians, too worldly in their thinking about sexuality, don't want to consider the possibility that the Mother of the Son, the foremost example of Christian devotion to God's divine will, she who is "blessed" to all the nations, the woman clothed with the Sun...was also virginal for the remainder of her life on Earth.

I'll follow this up tomorrow with some more in-depth analysis, but I just wanted to throw that out there for the moment.